Ok so let’s look at the countries highest on the Economic Freedom index.

Hong Kong tops the list right? It has what you would expect...

Capital has flowed in and normally that would have pushed blue collar workers and children and elderly out, with people commuting 2 hours each way as in SF. But since these are islands, the poor live in coffin like shoebox apartments, far smaller than anything allowed in US cities. Millions form entire communities of poverty around there, raise children there etc.

How large an effect are we talking? 20% of Hong Kong is below the poverty line. I did the math and any four people below the poverty line cannot together afford a studio apartment in normal areas of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has had to aggressively increase its welfare and safety nets. It has over 40 public hospitals and 20 private ones.

Suffice it to say that around the world, government-run and single-payer healthcare and schooling has been compatible with high scores on economic freedom. It’s only in the USA do we have this ridiculous fearmongering about that.

Hong Kong has, in many measures, a very strong safety net and strong public sector. Ditto for Singapore etc. And larger countries in Scandinavia, and Canada and Australia etc. are similar.

Much of the centrally coordinated infrastructure investment has paid off - in the US we had the interstate highway system, China lifted more people out of poverty in 20 years through centrally planned “ghost cities” than any place on Earth ever, and the USSR did a great job of increasing literacy, electricity, bringing universities, rights to women and minorities, to countries like Uzbekistan and that whole region. Child mortality declined greatly, as people got better access to healthcare.

Not to say that everything is black and white, but “economic freedom” and capitalism isn’t the only way science and technology and prosperity moves forward.

China hasn't fixed poverty though. A lot of migrant workers are left out in pensions, getting as low as 80$ per month.

Moving to those ghost cities have wrecked an entire generation, as it seems.

Moving people out of poverty includes the pension challenge. Which is the hardest one and I'm pretty sure that the one-child policy didn't contribute well to that part.

No doubt about it, getting off the addiction to the pyramid for social security will require a lot of automation (Japan is dealing with this now). But it’s the only sustainable way forward.

Look, China may not have eradicated poverty but certainly it was able to make the average wages go up 5x a decade for 20 years. Could this be done by uncoordinated market activity of private actors? Perhaps, but the USA has never been able to pull it off so fast.

Now one can argue the US always had a far higher starting point so it ran into diminishing returns. And that is a fair argument.

But keep in mind USSR’s GDP grew faster than USA and they faced the aftermath of two world wars, lost 30 million people and also subsidized lots of other countries in the Warsaw Pact (their version of the Marshall Plan). Compare apples to apples, eg the GDP of Romania after it joined the Eastern Bloc vs Hawaii after it was annexed as the 50th state of the US. Or compare GDP growth of Georgia and Puerto Rico.

It’s not actually clear which system led to more economic prosperity, and as I said the USA had the advantage of oceans protecting it, the dollar was the reserve currency all around the world after Bretton Woods, and we could import cheap goods all year long by just printing dollars. That has a massive effect on prosperity.

China's growth was the result of uncoordinated market activity of private actors. They switched systems.

I don't think Romania and Hawaii form an apples-to-apples comparison.

Romania: a country in Europe, occupied by the Soviets after World War II, with 16 million people. Neighbors Hungary, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and the Black Sea.

Hawaii: a U.S. territory for half a century, with 620 thousand people. Noted for its proximity to Johnston atoll (825 miles from Honolulu), Midway Island (1311 miles), and San Francisco (2393 miles).

What would you say is an Apples-to-Apples comparison?

And with China, I don’t think it is at all accurate to say that the millions of miles of new roads, bridges, infrastructure, ghost cities etc. were built because private market actors woke up one day and decided to make massive infra investments. It was central planning. And a lot of the science, electric vehicles etc. is sponsored by govt too, that is why China is the world leader.

If you're talking about roads and bridges, that's all we need to hear. You're constructing a strawman.

All the infrastructure including entire cities. Why is it a strawman

China's ghost cities were privately developed.

Edit: A better example for you would be Singapore, with its history of public housing, which gets privately owned (or 99-year-leased). They also have public roads.

Can you please back up your assertion with sources? Here is the opposite of what you said:

Developers acquire new plots of land from local governments and are mandated to construct something more or less immediately.[10] Developers can't sit idly on vacant land and wait for the surrounding area to develop until it's economically viable.[10] This creates the quick-buck mentality in developers to rapidly build in the new area without the necessary demand for housing.[10]

"The cities are product of plan-driven economy that many cities are not expected to be complete or vibrant after 15 years of construction." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

You literally backed it up for me.

I backed up pretty much the opposite of what you said. Massive government involvement setting the rules and mandates for developers who take the project.

I don't care what those jackasses say: the only thing they haven't sold off at this point is agricultural land, and the lizard men in the State Department are trying their hardest to loot this as well.